The Lighthouse of Maracaibo was selected for The Elevation Review's National Poetry Month issue in 2022. It's one of my favorite poems to read because of it's rhythm and colorful imagery. Maracaibo is the busiest port in South America and there's a reason why.
A peculiar combination of geological features generates intense weather. Lake Maracaibo is huge and warm, so there's lots of evaporation, plus there's moisture blowing in off the ocean. When that warm, humid air hits the cool Andes mountains, it condenses and clouds form. By afternoon, it's quite often raining.
The Catatumbo River is known as "The River of Fire" because of the lightning that strikes near its mouth, where it pours into Lake Maracaibo. Where the Catatumbo flows into the lake, there's a bog. As storms roil over the bog, lightning begins to strike, up to 280 times per hour and it can persist for more than ten hours.
Lightning makes a good backdrop for a love poem, but it creates some drama. I wanted an arc from chaos to calm. A phrase from Mary Oliver's poem, How I go into the Woods resonated with me, "If you have ever gone to the woods with me, I must love you very much." I remixed it in maritime style, "If you've ever gone down to the sea with me..."
I needed a word for the sound of the non-stop thunder and found gabble - to talk incessantly. I needed sea monsters, so like Homer's Odyssey, we sail between monsters Scylla and Charybdis, but the power of love calms them and keeps them at bay - I chose an old word, abeyant, meaning a state of suspension.
Chaos is one kind of freedom. I'd been thinking about freedom of speech and recalling the censorship portrayed in Milan Kundera's book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being. I kept thinking that Lightness is inevitable, so I remixed it as The Inevitable Lightness of Being, an unstoppable process by which we all end up rising.
I combined that with a quote I'd read from Stephen Hawking, ""If we discover a theory of everything, it would be the ultimate triumph of human reason, for then we would truly know the mind of God." Surely if we could know the mind of God, then we would realize the inevitable lightness of being.
I'd heard a line in a local reading that stuck in my head. It was about sailing at night, with the stars in the sky reflected in the water. As a young man, I sailed Lake Superior on a two-masted ship, out of Duluth's harbor. I remembered a night when the water sparkled with light, "Stars above, stars below."
To be alone with my love, I needed to drop the crew off, so I looked for a nearby port and found Baranquilla. The poem resolves with the ship adrift in calm seas, holding space for the lovers.
Lake Maracaibo formed more than twenty million years ago, so the phenomenon of frequent lightning storms may have a long history. The ozone produced by the strikes helps protect us from the sun's UV light. Explorer Amerigo Vespucci noted the lightning in his journals and by 1841 it had been christened "The Lighthouse of Maracaibo" because of its visibility at night, beckoning sailors to Maracaibo's port, which is today, as I mentioned, South America's busiest port.
You can read The Lighthouse of Maracaibo in Flywheels, page 34.
